An excellent library, but do students know how to use it?

ICU's library is voted as No.1 or No.2 among all Japanese university libraries year after year. I feel the resources in the library are satisfactory for most purposes, the staff are dedicated and friendly, and the facilities are comfortable. Today, my research paper writing class for 2nd year students had an orientation about how to use databases for finding sources, and the library staff gave a nicely planned overview of how to do key word searches and obtain relevant texts. The reminder about being critical of information was good too.

The main need for improvement on today's orientation was "interactivity". The lecture with PowerPoint was full of useful content, but the engagement of the students seemed low. I think the best solution is to put all resources on a website as a How to manual so that students can access by themselves when they have a need. The overview can be a video or voice over slide show easily and that will help the library staff avoid making a droning presentation to a large room of semi-engaged students. The interactive resources will be valuable for all students, not just the ones who enroll in the research writing class - so good luck ICU library! You're doing a good job! (I wrote this to them in Japanese already in the comment section of today's orientation )

Since I'm blogging about this, I should note that the library needs to be open more, like on Sundays, holidays, and later at night and on Saturday (they shut down at 4:30pm on Saturdays and are not open at all on Sunday - How are my students supposed to get their research done?)

Rabbit Proof Fence (Excellent-Please watch!)

http://movies.yahoo.com/movie/1808396460/info
A colleague lent the DVD to me to watch as a possible fim to use for our curriculum unit on the concept of "race." I hope I can arrange for my students to watch this because it is a good illustration in film of how one race and culture assumes and imposes its superiority on another race. Based on a true story, it is painful to watch how blind and harmful the benign intentions of the "Protector" of Aborigines are as it tries to breed out aboriginal blood by forcefully removing "half-caste" children from their mothers.

Training for Tokyo Marathon 2009

>Dear Mr. MARK CHRISTIANSON. [ID - 0849]
Congratulations! You have been selected to run the Tokyo Marathon 2009.

I'm in! http://www.tokyo42195.org/2009/index_e
Despite lottery odds of 7.5 to 1, I got lucky again for the second year in a row and am scheduled to run the big one with 35,000 others on March 22nd. Strangely lucky? Or does the committee have a policy of letting non-Japanese skip the lottery? All three of my regular Japanese running buddies failed to get in.

Now I need to get serious after staying off most running for most of November due to a painful ligament problem in my left foot. I'm not 100% yet, but had no problem with a one hour run yesterday. Fortunately, university is out for Spring break from late Feb, so I should be able to get plenty of miles in.

My running plan and time goal? Last year's time was 4h 57min, so anything less than that would be nice. Need to drop some weight and increase distances gradually 10~15km in Dec, 15~20km in Jan, 20~25km in Feb, and do some 30km runs in March before cooling down in the previous week. Something like this.

Learner Conceptualizations of Self-Confidence

Here is another 2008 paper I wrote with colleague Dr. Ohata based on interviews we conducted with ICU students following the end of their intensive first year academic English program.
http://jalt-publications.org/archive/proceedings/2007/E048.pdf

Learner Self-Assessment for Academic Speaking

Here's a link to a working paper I wrote together with Chris Hoskins based on a curriculum innovation we designed (with Atsuko Watanabe too, as course coordinators) and introduced at ICU this spring. I'm hoping to do more work in this area in the near future.
http://web.icu.ac.jp/lrb/vol_23_files/Christianson%26Hoskins2.pdf
http://web.icu.ac.jp/lrb/volume-23-2008.html

A difficult bioethics essay...

For my current academic reading and writing class (called ARW), I've assigned an argumentative essay of about 800 words on the issue of human cloning. We have a reading by molecular biologist Lee Silver of Princeton that argues for allowing cloning as a reproductive choice, and so my students' task is to answer the still hypothetical but most likely inevitable ethical question of:

"If the biotechnology for human cloning is 100% safe, should the government of Japan allow cloning as a reproductive choice?"

I find the essay is a good exercise of critical thinking in terms of requiring the learners to sort through their assumptions about cloning and clones and identify the most persuasive arguments for pro and con sides.

Most students instinctively choose "not allow" based on vague concepts such as "unnatural" and then struggle to defend the position with persuasive ethical arguments.

How would you answer something like that?

ＹＵＭ!

This is a test of blogging from my cell〜 This is Mei with her first ever taste of cotton candy.

Groping for the art of teaching "critical" reading

At ICU, students need to learn how to read "critically." So, how do we do that? First, we try to teach our students some of the ways to be "critical" about the ideas they encounter in a text.

-Ask "Really? Is this true?"
-Ask "What reasons or evidence does the author give to support the idea?"
-Ask "Are the reasons good reasons? Is the evidence reliable?"
-Ask "What is the author neglecting to include? Are there facts that should be mentioned or explained more?
-Ask "How could the author improve the persuasiveness of the point?"
-Ask...there are some other critical tools I can't recall at the moment
Telling them to try to do this is easy, but whether they learn to do it well (even when they are not reading assigned texts) is another question. The true test of critical reading comes when they are doing personal reading or research in the future. Will they examine ideas with the above questions instinctively?

Another important aspect of critical reading is how well they can express their critical reactions to a text. In other words, can they communicate the weaknesses of a text to others in a coherent and convincing way? When asked to prepare for a discussion about a text, or to write their opinion about a text, can they get to the core issues and point out the weaknesses, or do they end up with vague, flowery reactions such as "I think it is good. I agree with the author."

This term, to emphasize critical reading skills more than before, I am making significant changes in how I assign reading homework. Rather than mainly focusing class discussions on comprehension, I want students to present their critical reactions to each other. The difficulty in that is whether students will understand the reading enough to be appropriately critical about it...some will, but more students might get left behind than before. I'm still not sure how I'm going to support students in feeling confident about their ability to be critical readers and reactors, but I'm sure I'll find a way.

Do I buy what he wants for Christmas?

My 5 year old son Michael has a very clear idea of what he wants for Christmas. It is called the Pokemon Tower, and looks like this. He has a number of small Pokemon plastic figures, and idea seems to be to play with the figures on this Tower. In spite of our efforts to talk him out of it (why not make something with Legos?), he continues to insist that this is the only thing he really wants for Christmas. He is even working hard to put together a letter to Santa to ask for it. Apparently other kids at his preschool have it too, and he just needs to get it.

Right now, I'm thinking No way! He'll get bored with it and it will end up in a corner of the room taking up space we don't have in our apartment. But, at the same time, he seems to be getting his hopes up about the whole commercialized Christmas myth: If he is a good boy, his wish will come true. Do we grant it and keep his hopes in the magic of Christmas? Or, do we buy something sensible...

Starting Winter Term 08-09 (ARW, TW, AASP)

Just finished the first week of ICU's winter term. I have Academic Reading and Writing, Theme Writing, and Advanced Academic Speaking as my three courses. For ARW and TW, this is my third time. Only AASP is a first timer, and I am coordinating six teachers as well as teaching that.

Here are some personal goals for each of them:

ARW Winter:
I want to make each class discussion about the readings as meaningful as possible in terms of an opportunity to improve their mastery of academic vocabulary and discussion skills. I want almost all students to be prepared and excited about coming to discuss their ideas about the reading. My experience has been that, without an evaluation of "preparedness" students tend to lose their motivation to prepare well. Coming to a class full of unprepared students is discouraging for the well-prepared students, not to mention detrimental to the unprepared students themselves. The only method I know right now that keeps students on their toes is to require the submission of "discussion preparation notes" to prove how well they prepared. For the past two or three terms, I have required submission, and have taken time to rate them. Is it worth the effort? I think it is, as long as I can rate them very rapidly in a fair way...which is difficult. I'm still looking for a good solution on this.

Theme Writing:
In this research paper course, my main focus is how to keep struggling students meeting deadlines so that they don't fall out of communication...one important step will be meeting with them one by one at the topic selection stage next week. Struggling students have a negative cycle of 1) failing to come to class to hear advice or coming but not understanding, 2) writing their paper without really understanding what is expected, 3) feeling discouraged when they receive low evaluations on their work. I want to break that cycle somehow, and I think one key element is to provide information about our expectations for a "passing" paper in Japanese or at least in an extremely easy-to-understand, highly visual presentation so that there is no misunderstanding. The info ideally will be interactive so that students can demonstrate that they "got it" after the presentation by clicking on a quiz and/or sending their instructor some kind of email. I wonder what would be a good platform to do that...could it be a TW Blog with embedded Google Presentations and Google Spreadsheet Forms that will go into a spreadsheet to show level of understanding...automatic feedback would be nice. Moodle? Other online applications?

AASP:
This course focuses on discussion skills, and I did a survey of my students' self-identified needs on the first day. Many feel a lack of confidence with how to "lead" a discussion, especially because that requires the skill of understanding and summarizing what other members have said. Others feel that they just can't say what they want to say due to a lack of vocabulary or fluency. In Lesson No.2, all of them will have 10 minutes to present an issue and lead a discussion. That will give me a better idea of where they are in terms of their discussion skills. Hopefully, even though the class only has eight meetings, each of them will gain some confidence in their discussion skills.

As coordinator, I'm trying to lead a collaboration on making the course more satisfying for the students. I hope students feel the class meets their individual needs for improving spoken confidence in academic discussions - we'll see how that goes! As the final evaluation, I hope I can observe the improvement of each student in terms of how they set up a discussion with a topic they bring and lead the discussion. This type of evaluation has difficulties since the participants affect the leader's performance, but hopefully it will be a meaningful, formative, evaluation opportunity including a self-assessment and goal-setting for future improvement.

The program would really benefit from a recorded "model" discussion for students' to listen to and learn from. Can I get a few teachers together to do that (in my office - myself and three others on Monday?)